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The I-70 Scout & Eastern Colorado News

Tag: Cu Boulder

  • CU Boulder inventories, donates 130,000 pieces of PPE for health care workers, first responders

    CU Boulder inventories, donates 130,000 pieces of PPE for health care workers, first responders

    A half-dozen volunteers outside of CU Boulder’s Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) building began piling a mountain of boxes into two pickup trucks and a moving truck Friday afternoon. 

    The load: a whole lot of help from nearly 40 campus units.

    Across the country, health care professionals have pleaded for necessary supplies to respond to a pandemic that’s far outstripping their resources. The shortfall of so-called personal protective equipment (PPE) has left those workers in danger of becoming ill from COVID-19 as they treat patients. A lack of testing or vaccine has resulted in a virtual shut down of communities in an effort to flatten the curve, or slow the spread of coronavirus as it spreads around the globe. 

    CU Boulder joined an array of relief and supply efforts last week with a donation of more than 130,000 pieces of PPE. Dozens of departments, units and labs across campus donated gloves, N-95 masks, face shields, shoe covers and other PPE.

    The donation went to the Boulder Office of Emergency Management (OEM), which will distribute the supplies to health care providers, long-term care facilities and first responders throughout the county.

    “These donations far exceeded my expectations,” said Garry DeJong, director of campus emergency management. “Coupled with our researchers and engineers working on ways to keep people safe and finding ways to fight COVID-19, CU Boulder is making a sizable impact in this historic moment.”

    PPE is regularly used throughout CU Boulder’s campus for research and other purposes from chemical labs to University Libraries.

    DeJong led the charge alongside EHS Director Brandon Boger. Their teams worked for weeks soliciting donations across campus and creating an inventory. The donations equate to roughly 98% of the campus’ PPE. The remainder is being reserved for campus health care providers and essential workers. In alignment with Centers for Disease Control guidance, workers whose job duties do not require an N-95 mask are encouraged to wear homemade cloth masks.

    “We were hoping for five to ten departments to donate a few items,” said DeJong. 

    “Once the word got out about the donations drive, the CU partners just continually kept stepping up.”

    Mike Chard, director of the Boulder Office of Emergency Management, said he was extremely grateful.

    “The COVID-19 pandemic has created tremendous pressure on our health care systems, long-term care facilities and first responders,” Chard said. “Being able to keep the supply of medical and PPE at an essential service level preserves health care and government services and protects staff.”

    Margie Hunter, assistant to the director of EHS, was involved in coordinating and documenting the campus donations. Hunter and a small group of coworkers watched as emails rolled in from departments around campus looking to put their PPE to good use.

    “I think we all want to step up when a crisis occurs, but don’t always know what to do to help,” Hunter said. “I feel that this process gave each of us that measure of satisfaction and gratitude that we were doing something that would make a difference for those first responders and the medical personnel who are facing this thing firsthand.”

    Broader efforts

    Other faculty, staff and students have jumped into the fight as well. 

    Engineering faculty and students are 3D-printing key parts of protective face shields.

    Daniel Larremore, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and in the BioFrontiers Institute, is using Facebook data to track the virus’ spread, and perhaps predict where it could go in the coming weeks.

    The BioFrontiers Institute, the College of Engineering & Applied Science, the Sustainability, Energy & Environment Lab (SEEL) and other campus units also worked in the early stages of the pandemic to get respirators, sterilization ovens and other PPE to Boulder County Health officials.

    Community needs

    For students, faculty, staff and friends of CU Boulder looking to donate or give back to the community, you can find more via the new Buffs Together initiative.

    The state is organizing giving and volunteer opportunities through Help Colorado Now.

     

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  • CU Bouler’s Letter to student, faculty and staff regarding COVID-19

    CU Bouler’s Letter to student, faculty and staff regarding COVID-19

    CU Boulder’s Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano sent the following letter to students, faculty and staff March 11.

    Dear students, faculty and staff:

    The University of Colorado Boulder has faced many challenges in its nearly 150-year history. Generations of CU Boulder students, faculty and staff have worked together and supported each other. I thank you in advance for all that you have done and will do, and I ask that we show care and compassion for each other as we confront the challenges that COVID-19 poses in our community. We will get through this together.

    Today, I am announcing several campus actions to help limit COVID-19 risk on our campus. We will continue to fulfill our mission by ensuring that students are able to meet their educational requirements and faculty are able to continue their research and scholarship, and the campus will remain open to allow that to occur. We will continue to operate campus facilities, including residence halls, dining halls, the University Libraries, student recreation centers, the Center for Community, Wardenburg Health Center and the University Memorial Center. But, as local, national and global public health recommendations shift to include mitigation of transmission, we are proactively taking steps to protect the campus and the community.

    The campus is taking the following actions, which will be in effect until further notice.  

    Remote Teaching and Learning

    CU Boulder has already encouraged its faculty to teach remotely. Beginning Monday, March 16, the campus will transition to remote learning for the remainder of the semester. Faculty will determine how best to use technology, such as Canvas and Zoom, to enable students to complete their educational requirements. This is consistent with what several other institutions are already doing. 

    Remote Work

    The campus is encouraging employees to work remotely whenever possible. By Monday, March 16, supervisors should identify student workers, researchers and staff who can work remotely, meaning their work can be done partially or entirely away from campus. Supervisors should determine, in consultation with their employees, whether it is feasible for them to work remotely and, if so, the manner in which they will perform their responsibilities. As soon as a supervisor provides authorization, an employee can work remotely, recognizing that supervisors may need to evaluate campus needs and an employee’s work requirements on an ongoing basis. 

    Domestic and International Travel

    While we previously limited international travel, effective immediately, the campus is suspending all university-funded travel–foreign or domestic. Travel sponsors can apply for exceptions to this restriction by filling out the following domestic and international travel exceptions form. The campus will grant permission when the travel serves a significant need, and the risks of travel can be mitigated.

    Education Abroad

    Effective immediately, the university is suspending Education Abroad-sponsored  programs in the Czech Republic, France, Japan and Spain through the remainder of the spring 2020 semester. Students and their program providers are being notified. Earlier this semester, CU Boulder suspended programs to China, South Korea and Italy through summer 2020. These decisions are based on travel advisories from the U.S. Department of State, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other considerations as needed. Education Abroad has created a list of Education Abroad FAQs on the coronavirus. 

    Events

    Effective immediately, multi-day university-sponsored gatherings or those with more than 150 attendees are suspended until further guidance is issued. Event sponsors may request their events still be held and can request exemptions via the campus events exception form.

    We will be providing further guidance and direction about how to implement each of these decisions in the coming days. Please continue to reference the latest information at colorado.edu/coronavirus.

    The safety of our community is our top priority. We realize that our COVID-19 policy guidelines will cause disruption—and that you will have additional questions based on the above information—but the risk of not acting outweighs the inconvenience of these temporary measures.  

    I appreciate your patience and cooperation. We are grateful to staff for their tremendous efforts on our behalf during these challenging times, especially our front-line staff who serve in health care, custodial, food service, transportation and other areas on campus. Your work is critically important at this time, and we greatly value you and your contributions.

    Philip DiStefano,

    Chancellor

     

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  • On eve of Super Tuesday, study sheds light on how people make choices

    On eve of Super Tuesday, study sheds light on how people make choices

    On Super Tuesday, Democratic voters from Colorado and across the United States will face a serious decision: Sanders or Warren? Biden, Klobuchar or Bloomberg?

    Now, a new study taps into mathematics to probe how people make those kinds of fraught choices—in particular, how hypothetical, and completely rational, individuals might select between two options as they navigate through a noisy social environment.  

    It turns out that not making a choice can sometimes be as revealing as picking a side, report researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Houston. When the people around you are indecisive, for example, that can have a big influence on your own choices. 

    “Say you have a friend who has been a staunch Sanders supporter in the past,” said Zachary Kilpatrick, a coauthor of the new study and an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at CU Boulder. “It’s the night before the primary, and they still have not made a decision about who they’re going to vote for. That suggests that they have received some evidence that’s in conflict with voting for Sanders.”

    Kilpatrick will present his team’s results remotely at a meeting of the American Physical Society. (The physical conference has been canceled due to public health concerns).

    His team’s research zeroes in on a major question in a field of study called decision-making theory: How people make choices based both on their own, private research—such as watching televised debates—and through their social interactions—say, checking out their friends’ posts on social media.

    Kilpatrick compared that goal to the classic battle of wits between Vizzini and the Dread Pirate Roberts in the 1987 film The Princess Bride. In that scene, the pirate claims to have poisoned one of two glasses of wine. Vizzini, a scofflaw of supposedly vast intellect, must choose the one he thinks is safe to drink. 

    It gets complicated.

    “What Vizzini says is that he knows what the Dread Pirate Roberts knows that he knows,” Kilpatrick said. “But he takes multiple loops through what we call a ‘common knowledge’ exchange before he makes the decision on the wine glasses.”

    To explore similar kinds of intellectual spirals, Kilpatrick and his colleagues used a series of equations, or mathematical models, to simulate social interactions of varying complexity. Their models didn’t revolve around real-life voters, or even pirates, but “rational agents”—theoretical deciders who always make the right choices based on the evidence available to them. 

    “We’re both watching the same news show, for example, and I look over to you to see if you’ve made a decision or not,” Kilpatrick said. “We have to account for our common knowledge multiple times until we’ve adequately squeezed all of the information that we can out of the fact that you haven’t made a decision yet, and I haven’t made a decision yet.”

    Eventually, it stops. One voter or group of voters in a network might finally receive enough information to feel confident about their choice

    Kilpatrick is quick to note that, of course, no voter is perfectly rational. But scientists can still learn a lot by studying where real-life humans fall in line with what theory suggests they should do—and where they don’t.

    People should also always try to be aware of the baggage that others in their social networks carry, he added. 

    “When we’re determining how political leaders or people in our networks make decisions,” Kilpatrick said, “we should think hard about how those individuals are biased in order to figure out what we should take away from their decisions.”

     

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